Kali Reis Responds to Nic Pizzolatto's Petulant Criticisms of 'True Detective: Night Country'

By Dustin Rowles | TV | February 20, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | February 20, 2024 |

The only person more bitter about Issa López’s phenomenal fourth season of True Detective than the anguished True Detective subreddit is the series’ creator, Nic Pizzolatto, who has made his feelings known on Instagram in comments on his posts or, as is the case this week, with a few Insta reposts. Take this repost (that has since been deleted), for example:

Or the laughable suggestion, also reposted, that the critically derided second season of True Detective was better than the fourth:

Or this, which implies that Pizzolatto would have preferred to continue on as showrunner.

It’s all very sad, and to the first guy’s point: Season one was not by any means perfect. Pizzolatto weaved in a lot of lore, literary allusions, and sex cult stuff that ultimately didn’t matter much in the preposterous finale when we found out that the lawn mower guy did it. Talk about an unsatisfying conclusion. That whole finale felt like an insecure writer stitching together studio notes. There was absolutely no payoff, and it’s hard to stress just how instrumental the now disgraced Cary Joji Fukunaga was to that first season.

Pizzolatto, meanwhile, is reportedly difficult to work with — Fukunaga suggested as much, and third-season director Jeremy Saulnier (Green Room) had been expected to direct the entire season but left after two episodes due to “scheduling conflicts,” conflicts that he didn’t have when he agreed to direct the entire season. In the meantime, Pizzolatto’s career has mostly faltered and his FX deal fell apart, although he is working on a television reboot of The Magnificent Seven for Amazon — Pizzolatto wrote the script for the 2016 remake that not even Denzel Washington and Vincent D’Onofrio could save.

It’s a whole lot of sour grapes. Rather than defend herself, however, López has taken the high road. “I believe that every storyteller has a very specific, peculiar, and unique relation to the stories they create,” she told Roxana Hadadi over on Vulture a few weeks ago in response to Pizzolatto’s criticism. “And whatever his reactions are, he’s entitled to them. That’s his prerogative.”

Co-star Kali Reis — so good as Evangeline Navarro — was less diplomatic in her comments yesterday.